Google I/O is usually where the company reveals what’s happening with its smartphone OS for the next 12 months, but this year, Android is getting its own thing. A week ahead of I/O, Google will deep dive into the future of Android in a special edition of The Android Show.

The company said people have been asking for more ways to learn about how the Android experience is changing. (Who are these people?)

Google says it has “so many new things to share” regarding Android, hence this edition of The Android Show — a long-running YouTube series mainly for devs. The presentation will feature Android Ecosystem president Sameer Samat, but Google added that Android will still feature at I/O, where the company says it’ll reveal “even more special announcements and surprises.”

The Android Show: I/O Edition will air on May 13 at 1PM ET.

— Mat Smith

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All the big news you might have missed

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Nothing sub-brand CMF announced another cheap but stylish smartphone

The battery on the Phone Pro 2 lasts two full days on a charge.

CMF

Nothing says its CMF Phone Pro 2 is the lightest, slimmest smartphone it’s ever designed. It’s 7.8mm thin and 6.5 ounces, which may make it the lightest phone Nothing has ever made, but the iPhone 16, for instance, is just 6 ounces.

There’s a 6.77-inch FHD+ AMOLED display and a four-camera setup, complete with a 50MP main camera. That includes a telephoto lens, an ultra-wide and a front-facing selfie camera, but CMF is offering a modular twist, with the ability to attach fisheye and macro lenses.

The 256GB model costs just $279 and pre-orders are open now, shipping on May 6. However, the phone is only available for those in the company’s beta program. I have the phone right here, but there’s not much to report on until the frivolous accessories land alongside it.

Continue reading.

Researchers secretly experimented on Reddit users with AI-generated comments

They used bot accounts in r/changemyview.

A group of researchers covertly ran a months-long unauthorized experiment in one of Reddit’s most popular communities, using AI-generated comments to test the persuasiveness of large language models (LLMs). The experiment, which was revealed over the weekend by moderators of r/changemyview, is described by Reddit mods as “psychological manipulation” of unsuspecting users.

The researchers used LLMs to generate comments on r/changemyview, a subreddit where Reddit users share (often controversial or provocative) opinions and invite debate from other users. The community has 3.8 million members.

According to Reddit moderators, the AI took on numerous identities in comments during the experiment, including a sexual assault survivor, a trauma counselor “specializing in abuse” and a “Black man opposed to Black Lives Matter.” Many of the original comments have since been deleted.

Reddit appears to be considering some kind of legal action. Chief legal officer Ben Lee wrote that the researchers’ actions were “deeply wrong on both a moral and legal level” and a violation of Reddit’s site-wide rules.

Continue reading.

Russian regulators are trying to seize assets from the developers of World of Tanks

Russia took issue with Wargaming’s support of Ukraine.

Top executives from Wargaming and Lesta Games, the joint developers of World of Tanks, could have their stakes in their respective companies seized by the Russian government, according to reports from Russian news organizations RIA and RBC.

The execs are reportedly being accused of extremist activities by Russia’s prosecutor general (the country’s equivalent of the US attorney general) because of Wargaming’s support of Ukraine, RIA reports.

Development of World of Tanks was split in 2022 when Wargaming left its offices in Russia and Belarus. Russia began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine that same year. In response, Wargaming ran a campaign in World of Tanks to raise money for medical aid in Ukraine in 2023.

Continue reading.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/the-morning-after-engadget-newsletter-111532476.html?src=rss

Monty Python and the Holy Grail is widely considered to be among the best comedy films of all time, and it’s certainly one of the most quotable. This absurdist masterpiece sending up Arthurian legend turns 50 (!) this year.

It was partly Python member Terry Jones’ passion for the Middle Ages and Arthurian legend that inspired Holy Grail and its approach to comedy. (Jones even went on to direct a 2004 documentary, Medieval Lives.) The troupe members wrote several drafts beginning in 1973, and Jones and Terry Gilliam were co-directors—the first full-length feature for each, so filming was one long learning process. Reviews were mixed when Holy Grail was first released—much like they were for Young Frankenstein (1974), another comedic masterpiece—but audiences begged to differ. It was the top-grossing British film screened in the US in 1975. And its reputation has only grown over the ensuing decades.

The film’s broad cultural influence extends beyond the entertainment industry. Holy Grail has been the subject of multiple scholarly papers examining such topics as its effectiveness at teaching Arthurian literature or geometric thought and logic, the comedic techniques employed, and why the depiction of a killer rabbit is so fitting (killer rabbits frequently appear drawn in the margins of Gothic manuscripts). My personal favorite was a 2018 tongue-in-cheek paper on whether the Black Knight could have survived long enough to make good on his threat to bite King Arthur’s legs off (tl;dr: no).

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon doesn’t want to shoulder the blame for the cost of President Donald Trump’s trade war.

So the e-commerce giant will soon show how much Trump’s tariffs are adding to the price of each product, according to a person familiar with the plan.

The shopping site will display how much of an item’s cost is derived from tariffs — right next to the product’s total listed price.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The once-celebrated partnership between OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella is deteriorating amid fundamental disagreements over computing resources, model access, and AI capabilities, according to WSJ. The relationship that Altman once called “the best partnership in tech” has grown strained as both companies prepare for independent futures.

Tensions center on several critical areas: Microsoft’s provision of computing power, OpenAI’s willingness to share model access, and conflicting views on achieving humanlike intelligence. Altman has expressed confidence OpenAI can build models with humanlike intelligence soon — a milestone Nadella publicly dismissed as “nonsensical benchmark hacking” during a February podcast.

The companies retain significant leverage over each other. Microsoft can block OpenAI’s conversion to a for-profit entity, potentially costing the startup billions if not completed this year. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s board can trigger contract clauses preventing Microsoft from accessing its most advanced technology.

After Altman’s brief ouster in 2023 — dubbed “the blip” within OpenAI — Nadella pursued an “insurance policy” by hiring DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman for $650 million to develop competing models. The personal relationship has also cooled, with the executives now communicating primarily through scheduled weekly calls rather than frequent text exchanges.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to an email posted on Duolingo’s LinkedIn, the language learning app will “gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle.” Co-founder and CEO Luis von Ahn also said the company will be “AI-first.” The Verge reports: According to von Ahn, being “AI-first” means the company will “need to rethink much of how we work” and that “making minor tweaks to systems designed for humans won’t get us there.” As part of the shift, the company will roll out “a few constructive constraints,” including the changes to how it works with contractors, looking for AI use in hiring and in performance reviews, and that “headcount will only be given if a team cannot automate more of their work.”

von Ahn says that “Duolingo will remain a company that cares deeply about its employees” and that “this isn’t about replacing Duos with AI.” Instead, he says that the changes are “about removing bottlenecks” so that employees can “focus on creative work and real problems, not repetitive tasks.”

“AI isn’t just a productivity boost,” von Ahn says. “It helps us get closer to our mission. To teach well, we need to create a massive amount of content, and doing that manually doesn’t scale. One of the best decisions we made recently was replacing a slow, manual content creation process with one powered by AI. Without AI, it would take us decades to scale our content to more learners. We owe it to our learners to get them this content ASAP.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nixplay has dramatically reduced its free cloud storage offering for digital photo frame users from the original 10GB to just 500MB. The previously announced update, which took effect last week, also removed the formerly free ability to sync Google Photos albums. Users whose accounts already exceed the new 500MB limit will find their content “restricted from sharing or viewing” unless they edit their library or purchase a subscription. Nixplay now offers two paid tiers: Nixplay Lite at $19.99 annually for 100GB storage and Nixplay Plus at $29.99 yearly for unlimited storage.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Under President Trump, the Food and Drug Administration may no longer approve seasonal COVID-19 vaccines updated for the virus variants circulating that year, according to recent statements by Trump administration officials.

Since the acute phase of the pandemic, vaccine manufacturers have been subtly updating COVID-19 shots annually to precisely target the molecular signatures of the newest virus variants, which continually evolve to evade our immune responses. So far, the FDA has treated these tweaked vaccines the same way it treats seasonal flu shots, which have long been updated annually to match currently circulating strains of flu viruses.

The FDA does not consider seasonal flu shots brand-new vaccines. Rather, they’re just slightly altered versions of the approved vaccines. As such, the regulator does not require companies to conduct lengthy, expensive vaccine trials to prove that each slightly changed version is safe and effective. If they did, generating annual vaccines would be virtually impossible. Each year, from late February to early March, the FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the World Health Organization direct flu shot makers on what tweaks they should make to shots for the upcoming flu season. That gives manufacturers just enough time to develop tweaks and start manufacturing massive supplies of doses in time for the start of the flu season.

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OpenAI has upgraded ChatGPT’s search tool to include shopping features, allowing users to receive personalized product recommendations, view images and reviews, and access direct purchase links using natural language queries. TechCrunch reports: When ChatGPT users search for products, the chatbot will now offer a few recommendations, present images and reviews for those items, and include direct links to webpages where users can buy the products. OpenAI says users can ask hyper-specific questions in natural language and receive customized results. To start, OpenAI is experimenting with categories including fashion, beauty, home goods, and electronics. OpenAI is rolling out the feature in the default AI model for ChatGPT, GPT-4o, today for ChatGPT Pro, Plus, and Free users, as well as logged-out users around the globe.

[…] OpenAI claims its search product is growing rapidly. Users made more than a billion web searches in ChatGPT last week, the company told TechCrunch. OpenAI says it’s determining ChatGPT shopping results independently, and notes that ads are not part of this upgrade to ChatGPT search. The shopping results will be based on structured metadata from third parties, such as pricing, product descriptions, and reviews, according to OpenAI. The company won’t receive a kickback from purchases made through ChatGPT search. […] Soon, OpenAI says it will integrate its memory feature with shopping for Pro and Plus users, meaning ChatGPT will reference a user’s previous chats to make highly personalized product recommendations. The company previously updated ChatGPT to reference memory when making web searches broadly. However, these memory features won’t be available to users in the EU, the U.K., Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Since the Iberian Peninsula lost power in a massive blackout, grid operators are in the process of trying to restore power to millions of customers and businesses. As you might imagine, the process—termed a “black start”—is quite a bit more challenging than flicking on a switch. However, the challenge is made considerably more difficult because nearly everything about the system—from the management hardware that remotely controls the performance of the grid to the power plants themselves—needs power to operate.

Restarting the grid

You might think that a power plant could easily start generating power, but in reality, only a limited number of facilities have everything they need to handle a black start. That’s because it takes power to make power. Facilities that boil water have lots of powered pumps and valves, coal plants need to pulverize the fuel and move it to where it’s burned, etc. In most cases, black-start-rated plants have a diesel generator present to supply enough power to get the plant operating. These tend to be smaller plants, since they require proportionally smaller diesel generators.

The initial output of these black start facilities is then used to provide power to all the plants that need an external power source to operate. This has to be managed in a way that ensures that only other power plants get the first electrons to start moving on the grid, otherwise the normal demand would immediately overwhelm the limited number of small plants that are operating. Again, this has to be handled by facilities that need power in order to control the flow of energy across the grid. This is why managing the grid will never be as simple as “put the hardware on the Internet and control it remotely,” given that the Internet also needs power to operate.

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New submitter MicroBitz shares a report: SPROUT, short for Soft Pathfinding Robotic Observation Unit, is a flexible, vine-like robot developed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory in collaboration with the University of Notre Dame. Unlike rigid robots or static cameras, SPROUT can “grow” into tight, winding spaces that are otherwise inaccessible, giving first responders a new way to explore, map and assess collapsed structures. Beyond disaster response, the technology could be adapted for inspecting military systems or critical infrastructure in hard-to-reach places, making SPROUT a versatile tool for a variety of high-stakes scenarios. “The urban search-and-rescue environment can be brutal and unforgiving, where even the most hardened technology struggles to operate. The fundamental way a vine robot works mitigates a lot of the challenges that other platforms face,” says Chad Council, a member of the SPROUT team, which is led by Nathaniel Hanson.

“The mechanical performance of the robots has an immediate effect, but the real goal is to rethink the way sensors are used to enhance situational awareness for rescue teams,” adds Hanson. “Ultimately, we want SPROUT to provide a complete operating picture to teams before anyone enters a rubble pile.”

You can see the SPROUT vine robot in action in a YouTube video from MIT Lincoln Laboratory.

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On Thursday, OpenAI announced the addition of shopping features to ChatGPT Search. The new feature allows users to search for products and purchase them through merchant websites after being redirected from the ChatGPT interface. Product placement is not sponsored, and the update affects all users, regardless of whether they’ve signed in to an account.

Adam Fry, ChatGPT search product lead at OpenAI, showed Ars Technica’s sister site Wired how the new shopping system works during a demonstration. Users researching products like espresso machines or office chairs receive recommendations based on their stated preferences, stored memories, and product reviews from around the web.

According to Wired, the shopping experience in ChatGPT resembles Google Shopping. When users click on a product image, the interface displays multiple retailers like Amazon and Walmart on the right side of the screen, with buttons to complete purchases. OpenAI is currently experimenting with categories that include electronics, fashion, home goods, and beauty products.

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Wholesome Direct, an annual showcase of cute and cozy games, is returning on Saturday, June 7 at 12PM ET / 9AM PT. This year’s event will show off “a vibrant lineup of artistic, uplifting, and emotionally resonant games from developers of all sizes from around the world,” according to Wholesome Games’ announcement post. 

Last year’s Wholesome Direct covered over 30 games, including updates to already released titles and the reveal of entirely new games. The definition of “wholesome” is generally as broad as event organizer Wholesome Games needs it to be, but Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge from the 2024 Direct is a good example of the kind of game this showcase likes to feature. It’s a cute concept (a management game about running a wildlife refuge), has a beautifully illustrated art style and features relaxed, but deep gameplay. Many of the projects that fill out the average Wholesome Direct lineup fit a similar description.

Wholesome Games hasn’t yet announced which developers will be featured during the Wholesome Direct, but the odds are good that its own Wholesome Games Present publishing label will have some games in the mix. Is This Seat Taken?, a puzzle game about figuring out seating arrangements, doesn’t have a release date yet and would be a natural fit for the show.

Wholesome Direct 2025 will stream on YouTube and Twitch on June 7 at 12PM ET / 9AM PT. The showcase falls right in the middle of Summer Game Fest, a group of loosely-affiliated game showcases that start airing on June 6, 2025.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/wholesome-direct-2025-will-premiere-on-june-7-214501921.html?src=rss

Backblaze is dismissing allegations from a short seller that it engaged in “sham accounting” that could put the cloud storage and backup solution provider and its customers’ backups in jeopardy.

On April 24, Morpheus Research posted a lengthy report accusing the San Mateo, California-based firm of practicing “sham accounting and brazen insider dumping.” The claims largely stem from a pair of lawsuits filed against Backblaze by former employees Huey Hall [PDF] and James Kisner [PDF] in October. Per LinkedIn profiles, Hall was Backblaze’s head of finance from March 2020 to February 2024, and Kisner was Backblaze’s VP of investor relations and financial planning from May 2021 to November 2023.

As Morpheus wrote, the lawsuits accuse Backblaze’s founders of participating in “an aggressive trading plan to sell 10,000 shares a day, along with other potential sales from early employee holders, against ‘all external capital markets advice.’” The plan allegedly started in April 2022, after the IPO lockup period expired and despite advisor warnings, including one from a capital markets consultant that such a trading plan likely breached Backblaze’s fiduciary duties.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Milwaukee police are mulling a trade: 2.5 million mugshots for free use of facial recognition technology. Officials from the Milwaukee Police Department say swapping the photos with the software firm Biometrica will lead to quicker arrests and solving of crimes. But that benefit is unpersuasive for those who say the trade is startling, due to the concerns of the surveillance of city residents and possible federal agency access. “We recognize the very delicate balance between advancement in technology and ensuring we as a department do not violate the rights of all of those in this diverse community,” Milwaukee Police Chief of Staff Heather Hough said during an April 17 meeting.

For the first time, Milwaukee police officials detailed their plans to use the facial recognition technology during a meeting of the city’s Fire and Police Commission, the oversight body for those departments. In the past, the department relied on facial recognition technology belonging to neighboring police agencies. In an April 24 email, Hough said the department has not entered into an agreement with any facial recognition and the department intends to continue engaging the public before doing so. The department will discuss it at a future meeting of the city’s Public Safety and Health Committee next, she said. “While we would like to acquire the technology to assist in solving cases, being transparent with the community that we serve far outweighs the urgency to acquire,” she said in an email.

Officials said the technology alone could not be used as probable cause to arrest someone and the only authorized uses would be when there’s basis to believe criminal activity has happened or could happen, or a threat to public safety is imminent. Hough said the department intended to craft a policy that would ensure no one is arrested solely based on facial recognition matches. That reassurance and others from police officials came as activists, residents and some public officials voiced concern.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I remain perpetually wrong-footed by the Volkswagen Golf R, the more powerful all-wheel drive upgrade to the venerable VW Golf GTI. I always expect I’m in for a driving experience that is as measured and calm as it is fast. I don’t know why I continually underestimate the R—Ars has driven a few of them now, and you’d think I’d remember that maybe the R should stand for “raucous.”

VW has been making hot Golfs for as long as I’ve been on the planet—next year will be the GTI’s 50th anniversary. The super-GTI is a little newer. In 1986, the GTI was joined by a more powerful version with a 16-valve engine—here in the US, they also got a capacity bump from 1.8 to 2 L. Later, the much rarer Rallye Golf emerged as a homologation special. Five thousand all-wheel drive, supercharged Golfs were built to make the car eligible for Group A rallying, and then VW Motorsport built a small number of G60 Limiteds—essentially the Rallye with some added luxury like leather, ABS, and power steering.

The Mk2’s straight lines gave way to the Mk3’s curves, and by then, VW had developed its VR6 engine. Most engines with two banks of cylinders have a V angle of 60 or perhaps 90 degrees; with a V angle of just 15 degrees, the VR6 engine was able to fit in the tight confines of the Golf’s engine bay. For the Mk4 and Mk5, this morphed into the Golf R32, where the VR6’s power and torque were better harnessed by all-wheel drive.

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OnePlus undoubtedly hoped the release of its newest smartwatch had gone smoother. After delaying the launch, the company released the watch right at the peak of tariff drama. The watch debuted at a higher $500 price in the US, but OnePlus now says that after some adjustments, it is able to bring the price down by $150, and it’s staying there.

OnePlus, which is part of the Chinese megacorp Oppo, announced the OnePlus Watch 3 in early 2025. The first batch of units to roll off the line went out to reviewers, who promptly noticed that the underside featured a prominent typo, reading “Meda in China” instead of “Made in China.” OnePlus delayed the release to fix the issue.

That brings us to early April and the onslaught of tariffs, which are still hanging over the US economy. OnePlus finally released the watch, but it did so with a $500 price tag “due to the current market conditions.”

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For the past five years, Google’s Emoji Kitchen has offered a way for users to make unique emojis from existing icons. The feature lets you take two emojis and combine them into one to make emojis that are familiar yet new. You can take the saluting emoji and combine it with the robot emoji to make a saluting robot, or the alien emoji and the “shh” emoji to make an alien telling you to be quiet.

You can’t necessarily mix each and every emoji that you see in your emoji keyboard, though—first, Google has to make those combinations possible. Every now and then, Google will include new combinations within software updates, even if they don’t advertise each one. The more often you use emojis with Gboard, the more combinations you’re bound to discover.

But now, you no longer need to experiment with Emoji Kitchen in order to discover new combinations. In fact, Google will do the combining for you: All you have to do is scroll.

Browse Emoji Kitchen combinations on Pixel

As reported by 9to5Google, Google is rolling out an update to the emoji keyboard on Pixel devices. Once the update hits your Pixel, you’ll now see a short row of emoji combinations along the top of the emoji keyboard, with an arrow at the end of the row. Tap the arrow, and you’ll open up a full grid of emoji combinations, which you can scroll through for a long time. If you somehow reach the bottom without finding an emoji you like, you can return to the top of the grid and pull down to refresh the browser.

Credit: Jake Peterson/Lifehacker

When you do find a combination you like, tap on it. The emoji keyboard will reveal a pop up, showing you which two emojis were used to make this new one. If you want to use it, just tap Send.

Credit: Jake Peterson/Lifehacker

While the Emoji Kitchen is available on all devices using Gboard, the new Emoji Kitchen browser is exclusive to Pixel devices. Other devices will still need to create Emoji Kitchen icons by hand. Alternatively, you can use the “Randomize” option in the Emoji Kitchen tool built into Google: just search Emoji Kitchen in the web browser, then click Get cooking.

Inventor James Dyson described his career as “a life of failure” in a recent Wall Street Journal interview, citing setbacks as drivers of innovation. The 77-year-old creator of the bagless vacuum cleaner, who built a $16.8 billion fortune according to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index, created 5,127 prototypes over five years before successfully launching his signature product in 1993. “If something works, it’s less challenging, it’s less interesting,” Dyson said. “If something’s gone wrong, you want to know why it’s gone wrong, and it’s a learning process.”

Dyson’s company abandoned its electric vehicle project in 2019 despite investing over $600 million, concluding it wasn’t commercially viable. The prototype now sits prominently at the company’s Singapore headquarters. “I had to be pragmatic about it and say it’s too risky for us to do, which is a shame because I loved doing it,” Dyson said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google I/O is where we learn about many major features and updates that are coming to the company’s ecosystem, including on the Android front. The company is doing something a little different this year. Just ahead of I/O, it will provide a deep dive into the future of Android with a special edition of The Android Show.

This is the first time that Google has held such a showcase before I/O. The company says that people have been asking for more ways to learn about how the Android experience is changing and giving the ecosystem its own spotlight ahead of the main event is one way to do that. 

Google says it has “so many new things to share” regarding Android, hence this edition of The Android Show (a series that the company has been running for developers on YouTube for a while). The presentation will feature Android Ecosystem president Sameer Samat. Android will still be featured at I/O, where Google is promising to reveal “even more special announcements and surprises.” Multiple Android keynotes are scheduled for the event.

The Android Show: I/O Edition will air on May 13 at 1PM ET. Google I/O takes place a week later, starting on May 20. As ever, we’ll bring you all the important news and updates you need to know from the event right here on Engadget.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/google-is-giving-android-its-own-showcase-a-week-before-io-160035457.html?src=rss

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Youth culture moves fast. New slang is created and abandoned in days, whole communities organize around a blurry photograph, jokes become memes, memes become rituals, and everything might is abandoned before you even notice it exists. It’s like to trying to study a snowflake: Once you can look at it, it’s already melted. So it is this week, as I take a look a new lexicon of brain-rot slang (that might not really be slang), a meme format based on threatening to eat your Uber driver, and the performative disappointment of youth. Plus, as a reminder that we still still share something, a video about humanity’s never-ending fascination with digging holes.

What do “Kevin,” “gurt,” and “IKIAB” mean?

I cover slang a lot in this column and keep a running glossary of Gen Z and Gen A words, but I’m not sure what to make of “Kevin,” “gurt,” “IKIAB,” and countless other slang terms born in the past couple of weeks. To many young people, anything bad can be described as Kevin, and the word gurt means something like “smart but dangerous” and IKIAB is an acronym for “Imma keep it a buck,” which means “I’m telling the truth.” But maybe they don’t mean anything.

All these new words are part of the quickly evolving world of brain-rot memes, and they straddle a line between self-aware parody of slang and actual slang. IKIAB was coined a few weeks ago by TikTok user @xznthos, who declared it was new slang that everyone would now use. Gurt was invented and defined a few days later, and Kevin a few days after that. This led to making up slang words becoming a meme format in brain-rot videos, with all kinds of people declaring that all kinds of words now mean all kinds of things. But do they? Is slang really slang just because someone says it is and a lot of people see the video?

Taking it a step further, a writer at Daily Dot asked Google Search’s generative AI Overview to define nonsense phrases like “banana slurp” and “cyclops vibing,” and it answered that banana slurp “could potentially be a misinterpretation of ‘that’s bananas’ or ‘she/he went bananas,’ which both mean something is crazy, wild, or extremely agitated,” and that cyclops vibing “essentially suggests that a person is enjoying themselves and in a good place, even if they are depicted with a somewhat intimidating or unusual image like a cyclops.”

So you don’t even need a person to have ever used a word or phrase for it to have a definition (at least to a computer), so when is a word slang and when is it nonsense? That’s the kind of question only a total stork smoother would ask.

What is the “I’m so hungry I could eat…” trend?

The “I’m so hungry I could eat…” trend is way easier to understand than brain-rot slang. It’s a form of prank video where you secretly record someone’s reaction to you saying, “I’m so hungry I could eat X,” with X being whatever is likely to get the biggest reaction.

It started with videos of parents saying “I’m so hungry I could eat a kid” to their kids, which is adorable:

Then dog owners started threatening to eat their dogs:

Then things started getting stranger, like this video where someone threatens to eat their Uber driver.

But the height of the trend is saying you’re so hungry they could eat a random, specific person from their victim’s past. Like an old classmate who might have been dangerous:

or their first boyfriend:

or their coke dealer from the 90s.

What is the Hiccup Cult?

If your child has just joined The Hiccup Cult, don’t worry. It’s not a cult like The People’s Temple; it’s just a random TikTok thing with no real meaning. A few weeks ago, TikToker @annesstinkysock posted a video where they pointed out that the character Hiccup from How to Train Your Dragon is kind of funny-looking, and that she’d changed her profile picture to an image of Hiccup. That’s it. That’s the whole origin story. For some reason no one can explain, this video was spat out to millions of TikTok users, thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of whom changed their own profile pictures to Hiccup. Many of them started following each other, and a cult was born. To join, you just have to change your profile picture to Hiccup and you’re in.

TikTok cults aren’t new. There have been a ton of them revolving around a picture of a hamster, or Dragon Ball character Goku, or minions. It’s the kind of thing that will be forgotten quickly, but maybe it provides some sense of belonging for the 12 seconds it exists.

“Rejection cakes” take over the internet

It’s the time of year when high school seniors are crossing their fingers and receiving their acceptance or rejection emails from the colleges they applied to. As you’d probably expect, social media is filled with videos of over-achievers crying happy tears because they were accepted at Harvard, Boston College, or all four of the Ivy League schools they applied to. As you’d probably expect, it’s getting ridiculous. Just check out how elaborate this video is for getting into UT Austin:

Good for her and all, but I mean, it’s UT Austin? Anyway, I’m more interested in the people who won’t be choosing between Yale and Dartmouth this fall. The trend for the rest of us, the also-rans and the almost-made-its, this year is rejection cakes. Videos like this one:

and this one:

are providing a much-needed counter-narrative to all the terrible success some people experience. I think there’s something more valuable in performative displays of resilience than displays of pride, because we can’t all get into Stanford, but we can all eat cake. Anyway, If you’d like to look at young people who have had their hopes dashed early instead of having them dashed when they graduate from their dream college there’s a bunch of videos here.

Viral video of the week: A Video About Digging A Hole

A lot of youth culture these days lives up to the “brain-rot” name, but there’s always a yin to the yang, like this week’s viral video, “A Video About Digging a Hole.” This video will not rot anyone’s brain. In it, YouTuber Jacob Geller goes deep into the subject of holes. People, particularly younger people, have always been fascinated with holes, and Geller’s video examines the cultural and symbolic power of the simple hole in the ground, finding connections between Louis Sachar’s classic young adult novel Holes, Minecraft’s constant digging and tunneling, 2025’s unexpected blockbuster video game A Game About Digging a Hole, and way more hole-based media. This video is worth the watch just for the section on The Kola Superdeep Borehole—the deepest hole humans have ever dug.